Time Management and Why it’s Vital to Sales Success

Firstly, lets define what ‘time management’ is – it is simply making every minute of your working day productive. So let’s define ‘productive’ from a sales perspective. It means either you are seeking out new prospects, working on your pipeline of potential opportunities, researching new prospects, meeting with prospects to close deals, networking through social media. In fact any activity that helps you meet your sales targets month in month out.

Let me tell you honestly, I have to work so hard to manage my time, I get distracted, sometimes busy with admin (which is necessary of course) or for some personal reason I have lost my ‘mojo’ to get into it. Sound familiar?

Well for many years my day used to start with a ‘to do’ list – in fact I do that still. After 6 x decades it is incredibly hard to change habits. Not that it’s a bad habit – in fact if you do that now already you are well on your way to squeezing every minute of productivity out of your working day.

Now here’s the trap – you get to 6pm and you still have 3 things left on your ‘to do’ list. So you work on until 9pm to get things done, your family wonders why you aren’t at the dinner table, and then you microwave your glad wrapped dinner, go to bed and it all starts over the next day.

I can tell you from experience that this approach jeopardizes you and your health, your family relationships, and causes you stress. Eventually you burn out. I did – several times.

I am personally a pretty high energy individual and am in the process of mastering the use of outlook calendar. I don’t want to work 60 hours a week anymore, but in order to channel my energy effectively into productive sales activity I have had to change. It is a work in progress, and if I can do it anyone can.

So I have learnt not to be over enthusiastic by putting a task into calendar for 1 hour when realistically that task would take me 2 hours. Set reminders and sync with your phone but don’t overload your calendar just to make you feel good and impress others. The only thing that impresses others in sales is results.